Customer Reviews

Redesigning Healthcare Delivery: A Practical Guide to Reengineering, Restructuring, & Renewal

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REDESIGNING HEALTHCARE DELIVERY:

A Practical Guide to Reengineering, Restructuring, and Renewal

CIOs are in for a shock when they read REDESIGNING HEATLHCARE DELIVERY: A Practical Guide to Reengineering, Restructuring, and Renewal recently published by Boland Healthcare. This nine hundred plus page book documents why most health care organizations are not working well and what they must do to meet customer needs. What is startling about this book is the level of detail it goes into in describing just how far hospitals, medical groups, and managed care companies must go to improve quality and lower costs at the same time.

This forty chapter book was written by operational experts as a comprehensive survival guide to managed care. It offers step-by-step instructions and case studies for redesigning inpatient, outpatient, and ambulatory care. With a hundred plus tables and figures, it describes methodologies, strategies, and techniques to improve performance and document value.

The book draws on a "best practices" approach to information system design and management that shows how to refocus core functions and services around customer needs-rather than traditional provider priorities and values. This means a fundamental shift in the way health care is designed, managed, and delivered. The book advocates using multidisciplinary patient care teams and information technology to standardize treatment protocols and integrate financial, clinical, and administrative data.

Redesigning Healthcare Delivery provides practical methodologies for organizations to lead and manage change. Part one establishes the rationale for repositioning medical institutions as market-focused organizations. Part two explains the management principals and transformation steps required for effective change management. Part three presents a wide variety of case studies on business process redesign and the lessons learned from each for providers and customers. Part four details the management tools, particularly IS and IT, and communications strategies required to change individual behavior and organizational performance.

The central theme running throughout the book is that health care executives-particularly CIOs - need to develop and use new change management tools and IS/IT is the most important one. The solution, however is not to rely solely on technological approaches but to use them to better manage the human aspects of change. This is a fundamental concept because information technology can only go so far in restructuring work and operations by itself. What characterizes the most successful change initiatives in this book is a profound strategic commitment to better customer service.

The book's editor, health care industry analyst Peter Boland, states that unless health care organizations can implement IS/IT rapidly to refocus institutions on customer service, then the market will pass them by. Thus, information technology becomes the main enabler to lead both internal change and document tangible value to patients and customers.

Book Review Author

Walter Wieners, Consultant, Sausalito, CA, USA, provides managed care planning and strategic business advice both in the United States and internationally.